Various Artists: Hot Rods & Custom Classics: Cruisin' Songs & Highway Hits

Other countries made and drove cars, but it took America, specifically the Southern California part of America, to build a culture around them. Though in existence before, a national passion for hot rods and customized cars boomed in the wake of WWII, inspiring a youth culture revolving around everything fast, loud, and flashy. In his essay "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" (reprinted in the booklet to the new box set Hot Rods & Custom Cars), Tom Wolfe explained the appeal of the inherently useless feature of tailfins by writing that "the car in America is half fantasy anyway." Like surfing, that other sub-culture refined and perfected in Southern California, the fantasy of the car extended to music. Though not quite as distinct a musical genre as surf-rock, hot-rod songs proliferated in the '50s and '60s, and this box has plenty of them. But Hot Rods & Custom Classics doesn't limit itself to the golden age of driving music. An insightful booklet with essays on car culture aside, this set is little more than an excuse to pack four CDs of songs about cars—with a non-exclusive emphasis on tracks from the height of hot-rod fever—into a box that looks like a modeling kit, and pad it out with a MoonEyes car-accessories catalog, some fuzzy dice, a bunch of stickers, and a bottle-opener key chain. Well, God bless it: Hot Rods makes a pretty good case for the notion that there's nothing more joyful than the sound of a human voice singing about cars against a driving backbeat. The usual suspects ("Radar Love," "Mustang Sally," "Low Rider," "No Particular Place To Go") turn up, of course, but they're here alongside such great, unexpected tracks as Mr. Bear & His Bearcats' "Radar," pioneering lesbian folkie Phranc's "'64 Ford," and Johnny Cash's pointedly funny "One Piece At A Time." What's more, the whole thing has been beautifully sequenced, with songs about Cadillacs, Fords, and other models grouped together by theme and complemented by vintage commercials and car sounds. In addition to the celebrations of the virtues of various big American cars, Hot Rods also includes such cautionary tales as Robert Mitchum's "The Ballad Of Thunder Road" and Nervous Norvus' "Transfusion," which includes such priceless lines as, "My red corpsucles [sic] are in mass confusion" and, "Hey, Daddy-O / make that Type O." A bit more information on each song would have been nice, as would the exclusion of anything by The Doobie Brothers, but it's hard to find fault with this collection, even if you're not opening up a car on the highway while you listen to it. Though that probably wouldn't hurt.